Competitor price monitoring is the regular tracking of prices of comparable products at other sellers. It is used in shaping pricing strategy, tracking promotions, and deciding on discounts. Technically it involves collecting from publicly accessible websites or comparison sites, where the most demanding part is not the collection itself but reliably matching products across stores, where names, packaging and variants differ. Automated collection must respect the sites' terms of use, a reasonable frequency of requests, and database protection rules. Commercially, it is important not to reduce decision-making to the lowest price – automatically undercutting competitors leads to a price spiral in which everyone loses. The data should therefore be used as an input, not as a rule.
See also: Legal aspects of scraping, Price comparison website, Margin and discount promotions.
